Computer science/Catalogs/List of seminal concepts in computer science

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This is a list of seminal concepts in computer science.

• virtual memory - also memory management in general
• 1952: the first compiler written by Grace Hopper - also programming language, interpreter
• operating system (invention of) - also batch processing, timesharing
• threading and local variable scope, requiring use of stack frames
• stored program architecture
• probably EDVAC was the first instance: Von Neumann architecture (having program and data in same physical memory)
• Harvard Mark I: Harvard architecture (having program and data in different physical memories)
• 1950's (need exact date); Konrad Zuse was likely the first to propose pipelining of processor instructions for faster throughput (invention of); but I don't know what computer actually did it first
• all the other key processor design speedups, at least the biggest concepts (each has a multiple ways of being realized)
• compiler optimizations
• advent of managed code languages, such as Java, that can provide "type safety" and other benefits such as substantial software reuse by means of shared libraries
• hardware abstraction layer - having an OS (Unix) written 99% in a high-level language (C), so that to port the OS to a different processor required mainly writing a C compiler for that processor (I don't know a neat name for this, but it's a huge concept--it, and the item above, are precursors to what open source projects now do when they have to compile their code for various hardware/OS platforms--they use an intermediate language to shelter high-level development from platform details; the BIOS does this in an IBM compatible PC
• relational database model first proposed by E.F. Codd in 1969.
• the various ways (past and present) for distributing applications across a network, or making procedure calls across a network: EDI, COM, COM+, CORBA, RPC, XML-RPC, and now XML web services (so-called Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA)